JACK McCAFFERY: These Birds have already flown South

Philadelphia Eagles head coach Andy Reid leaves the field after an NFL football game against the Washington Redskins in Landover, Md., Sunday, Nov. 18, 2012. The Redskins won 31-6. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

LANDOVER, Md. — The system went first, a victim of too many years of Andy Reid’s softening voice. The era is gone, too, fallen in a 3-7 start to what was expected to be a championship-quality season. The owner’s patience and the fans’ tolerance, a defensive coordinator and a $100,000,000 quarterback … gone, all of them.

The last thing Jeffrey Lurie can protect — other than his own dignity — is his players. And after the Eagles’ 31-6 loss Sunday to the Redskins, that had to have become his most immediate challenge.

On a day when the Eagles’ defensive backs barely patrolled the goal line, the offensive linemen were too often in retreat, wide receivers jogged into the secondary and running backs approached gaps too timidly, Lurie had to have collided with a franchise-defining moment. He knows he will make a coaching change; he all but promised that anything short of substantial improvement over Reid’s 8-8 record in 2011 would be unacceptable. But unless the Eagles play with more passion than they showed Sunday, that thud he hears will be more than just a collapse into last place in the NFC East.

Reid has said it is his responsibility for the Eagles to play well. Since that is not being met, Lurie either has to find a coach who will meet it, or risk six more weeks of his players being shoved around football fields and risking injury. Already playing without concussed, nine-figure quarterback Michael Vick, the Birds have their other prominent offensive force, LeSean McCoy, battling his own concussion. Because football players experienced head trauma long before the 2012 Eagles started playing so sloppily, there is no particular connection between McCoy’s and the Birds’ day-long nap. That, though, is what Lurie has to decide: Can the Eagles survive the rest of the season playing as they did Sunday?

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“I can’t speak for everybody,” Evan Mathis said. “But there are guys on this team who care. I say ‘most’ players only because I don’t see every one of them. If I saw a problem, I would confront that guy. I still think this team has heart. It’s hard to pinpoint what is happening.”

No. It’s really not. They are dropping passes. They are failing to tackle with authority. They are exposing their quarterbacks, plural, to too much pressure. And they are playing as if they know what’s next, for they read, too. Lurie has said Reid will not survive an ordinary season. Once that became inevitable, Reid’s authority was necessarily compromised. Clearly, the coach’s message is not resonating --- the message he has promised so many times to deliver.

So where’s the value in keeping Reid, even for just 360 more minutes of the kind of football the Eagles littered on FedEx Field? As the end of the season, Lurie could hire his next full-time coach. But even if he to hang an interim-coach asterisk on his operation — Todd Bowles, just for a name, anybody? — there would at least be a chance for some late-season buoyancy. At the minimum, the customers would deserve prospect of rejuvenation.

Not that he should, but Reid made it plain that he would not surrender. Asked if he intended to finish the season as the coach, he stiff-upper-lipped: “We need to get ready for the Monday night game.” That will be against Carolina next week in the Linc. Just a guess, but the masses will be ready, too. They can tolerate losses, and the occasional whiffed draft, and the growth of a new quarterback. But Eagles fans will not accept running a losing steak to six with touchdown-free football and uninspired defense.

“I don’t think it is a lack of focus,” Reid said. “I see them playing hard. I see them focused at practice. I think at times we may be trying too hard and you can’t press them and make plays.”

He sees one thing during the workweek. Everyone else, including the 79,327 in the stadium Sunday, sees something else on long weekends. That means Reid’s effectiveness has been lost. Just like a system and an era and any reason for the owner to show patience.